The dog that didn’t bark in the night is always the give-away.
There are almost no dogs barking across Europe at the calamitous failure of the European Union to protect its citizens a full year after the Pandemic arrived on its larger shores.
Worse, for a few hours, the European Union, so beloved of Dublin’s chattering classes, repartitioned Ireland. That it was more in a fit of absent-mindedness by our beloved (if unelected) EU President Ursula von der Leyen than it was an embrace of a clear policy is irrelevant. Absent-mindedness sank the Titanic. Yet her reckless stunt didn’t cause uproar in Dublin. Why? Oh, because we’re good Europeans, unlike those nasty heathen Brits and Serbs.
Neither of their countries is in the EU and both are well ahead of the EU in their vaccination programmes. So just who is this woman, Ursula von der Leyen, who appears to have such a casual disregard for the health of the peoples of the EU? Ursula, as you know, is Latin for “little bear”, a term which comes nowhere close to describing a woman whose political career in Germany only began late in life after she had produced a large family: less of a little than a Wunderbear.
Her political career rapidly took off and she was soon appointed as the German Minister for Defence, in which role she turned the Bundeswehr into an exquisite embodiment of political correctness. That it was quite unable to defend Germany is of course irrelevant. Bundeswehr documents now routinely refer to “servicewomen and servicemen” in that order, even though the German army is only 6.6% female, with its women mostly engaged in administrative work. At the end of her reign, a report from Hans-Peter Bartels, the armed forces parliamentary commissioner, typified the frivolousness that results when armies attempt to incorporate the PC rulebook into military structures. It complained that the German army’s personnel carriers were so small that “servicewomen” of over 1.84 metres (6 foot 3) could not fit into them. This fatuous observation was presented with the same gravity that accompanied the revelation that not a single German navy submarine or tanker was capable of going to sea. Of the army’s 176 Puma combat vehicles, only 48 (27%) were usable. Of just 44 tanks, only 26 (60%) were working. Of the Luftwaffe’s 139 Eurofighters, only around 40 (29%) could take off, which was probably just as well, because the Luftwaffe didn’t have the pilots to fly them. And those who could fly were gravely under-trained. A Eurofighter pilot needs at the very least 180 hours flight-time annually to maintain combat-readiness: Luftwaffe pilots manage only 125 hours a year (or 150 minutes a week, or half an hour per weekday) which is 70% of the very minimum. German Arctic troops are so short of winter clothing that they have to take turns wearing the army’s Woolpower thermal long-johns: the Wunderbear’s Bundeswehr underwehr-share.
But never fear! In other areas, the Wunderbear’s Bundeswehr has been a stunning success. The driver-seats in the few German army tanks that actually work have been redesigned to accommodate pregnant she-soldiers, who clearly make fearless warriors with babies in their wombs. And as Bartels proudly declared, under von der Leyen, “the Bundeswehr was extraordinarily progressive on the topic of diversity (with) a new guide on the treatment of transexual people….The Bundeswehr philosophy is that no-one has to give up their identity at the barracks gate.”
Well, nearly no-one. During her time, supporters of “German self-governance” (ie, Germexit) were redesignated “right-wing extremists” and could accordingly be expelled from the Bundeswehr. Naturally, Bartel’s report mentions “right-wing extremism” in the Bundeswehr ten times, “Islamic extremism” just once and “left-wing extremism” not at all. Meanwhile, both platoons of the Maltese army could probably have landed in Bavaria, advanced to the Baltic and seized Hamburg without the Bundeswehr even halting the transgender-awareness training-classes of its Special Forces. Clearly, the Wunderbear has all the credentials to lead Europe into the third decade of the 21st century.
Now it would be churlish to be critical of her initial failure to cope with a pandemic unprecedented in world history, even if her first proposal to combat the crisis was a video showing people how to wash their hands to the tune of the EU anthem: The Ode to Soap. But the excuse of inexperience lasts only so long. Just consider the two much-loathed bugbears of the Irish media, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump; it would need a highly delicate Geiger counter to detect any modesty, honesty, decency or reticence in either character, yet recent statistics irrefutably show that they finally managed to get the vaccine-priorities sort of right.
Whereas Europe, under the skilful guidance of our beloved and unelected Wunderbear, got them catastrophically wrong. Possibly thousands of Europeans will die this year because of the EU’s appalling decision-making, and maybe scores of these will be Irish. Yet for the people of Ireland, what has been the only visible measure that von der Leyen has taken to cope with the vaccine shortage? She invoked Article Sixteen of the incomprehensible Protocol to close the Border and so prevent vaccines leaking from the Republic into the North, which is rather like Mexico closing its border with the US to prevent Elon Musk getting his hands its interplanetary secrets. And anyway, how was she going to “re-erect” the Border? By deploying a few platoons of the transgender-friendly Bundeswehr?
This is all fantasy land: but what other territory does the Republic of Ireland now occupy but the imaginary one defined by a passionate desire Not To Be British? So, aside from the British, we’re the only people in Europe to eat marmalade at breakfast and mince pies at Christmas and fish and chips and Yorkshire pudding and have water-tanks in our attics (thanks to the Great Fire of London), and practise English common law before wigged judges, while Grafton Street looks just like Luton High Street, but nonetheless, we are not British.
And yes, after hundreds of years of inept government from London, I’m absolutely fine with that. But what I’m not fine with is this frothingly Anglophobic devotion to the EU. Has everyone forgotten that the troika, namely the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund, strapped us to the bonnet of a Mercedes Kompressor, slammed a plank of wood between our teeth and rode us to the tune of €34,500 for every child, woman and man in the Republic in what is otherwise known as the great bank bailout? Why? Because we had to repay the German banks every single europfennig they’d had lost in the insane casino that was the property boom of the final days of the Celtic tiger. And you really don’t need a PhD in business studies to twig that when a two-room shoebox with wet rot and one resident rat (single, bi, GSOH) in Drimnagh was fetching the same as a chateau and a vineyard in Burgundy, Ireland had embarked on yet another cycle of its regular bouts of economic madness. But that didn’t stop the German banks gambling in the great Ponzi scheme of the Irish property market. And nor did it stop the troika – two arms of which are owned by the EU while the third largely does its bidding – from compelling us to repay the German banks the billions they’d squandered. We did this by borrowing money from German banks to repay those very same German banks the money that they’d squan…..et cetera.
Despite this, since the Brexit vote the Irish media have been preening themselves over what good Europeans we are compared to the dastardly Brits. But why this attachment to a union that raped us and which now insists we adhere to its suicidal rules on coping with the virus? Why slavishly follow a woman who is completely fluent in just three languages and equally inept in them all? And this was even before the EU’s reintroduction of land-borders in Ireland, which a previous EU-loving Irish government (Varadkar’s) had already warned would restart the Troubles.
Meanwhile, as people continue to sicken and die across the EU, in the UK the vaccination programme has roared ahead, with around 20% of the population already inoculated. Look at the figures for Ireland. About 27% of the adult population of Northern Ireland have been vaccinated, compared to 5% of the population of the Republic. Even poor battered Serbia, not in the EU, has managed to vaccinate 8% of its population, compared to the 2.5% of neighbouring Croatia, in the EU. Meanwhile, the Wunderbear’s EU has spent almost €1,000,000,000,000 (yes, you read that right) merely to mitigate the economic consequences of the virus even as the evil little micro-atom pinballs its way around Europe’s unprotected populations. But she probably knows the answer to our problems: a little diversity training here, a touch of transgenderism there, and maybe a few pregnancy-friendly seats for geriatric men in old people’s homes will see us right. Wunderbar.
(ends)